Lakeith Stanfield Thinks We Should All Probably Take a Break From the Internet

A few days before I meet him, Lakeith Stanfield, the 26-year-old star of Sorry to Bother You, does something that I find completely insane, or at the very least, possibly dangerous: He tweets his phone number. (Tweeting will prove problematic for Stanfield—more on that in a minute.) “I wanna say Hi to some of you guys,” he writes. He had done this before, a few years ago, he tells me later, and he had some nice conversations. He thinks, in fact, that he may have made a few people’s days. For the record, from a different type of celebrity, this behavior would be insufferably phony; from Stanfield, who at this point seems to embody a certain brand of ineffable millennial cool, it is somehow charm incarnate.

Before, “I got to just talk to people, and it was nice, and I thought that maybe I could just do that again,” he tells me when we meet in Brooklyn on a warm evening in early May. But that was then—somewhere between his breakout role in 2013’s Short Term 12 and in culture-quaking projects like Selma, Straight Outta Compton, Atlanta, and Get Out. These days, Stanfield is a bona fide star, and not just an indie star; he’s a prestige television, leading man, went-to-the-Oscars-and-his-movie-won star—the kind who gets cast by Jordan Peele and Jay-Z and inspires admiring, unprintable comments on Instagram (are you familiar with the drool emoji?). These days, his gesture at a larger connectivity means he is immediately deluged, his device goes berserk, he has to cut it off, tweet a cease-fire, and delete the evidence. “I couldn’t use that phone for a while,” he admits (though, he adds, it was a “trap phone”). He got a new one. That’s the thing about becoming everyone’s favorite on-screen presence; when everybody wants to know you, they don’t not break your phone with their calls if you’ll let them.

So how do you establish one of the more interesting careers in Hollywood in five years or less? If you ask Stanfield, it’s some mix of luck and fate and accident. He met Ava DuVernay at an awards season brunch; she later cast him in Selma. (“You look in his eyes and see this vulnerability and sweetness,” DuVernay told Complex.) He met Donald Glover while clubbing (“I bump up against this dude with an Afro and good-lookin’ shoes, and I go, ‘Those are some nice shoes, bro—Oh, you’re Gambino, I know who you are,’ and he’s like, ‘Oh, hey man, by the way, I think you might be good for this role; I’m coming out with a little show’ ”); now he’s a lead on Atlanta, the best show on television.

He’s also a natural performer, one who grew up loose-limbed and quick, trying on his aunt’s wigs in front of the mirror (he still does, but they’re his wigs now: “the only reason you don’t see wigs laying around here right now is because I’m not home, but home, I have wigs everywhere”) amazed that the being he felt he was—boundless, barrier-less, “like I was much more than what was confined in this body”—was, in fact, what he saw reflected back at him. He’s uncompromising—the fact that you likely love all of his work, or that it’s trending toward being Important (with a capital I) is not the point. “My interest is not necessarily in having a record of things that are unimpeachable, or even that people enjoy, necessarily,” Stanfield says. “Movies like Sorry to Bother You I hope people enjoy and love as much as I do,” he says of Boots Riley’s delirious, at times truly excellent magical-realist sociopolitical satire, in which Stanfield stars as Cassius Green, an Oakland telemarketer who discovers his “white voice” and skyrockets into the treacherous upper echelons of a nefarious capitalist scheme. “But I’m not afraid of the response.” Riley’s film is guaranteed to polarize critics, and that’s just fine. It’s inspired him, Stanfield says, to make more work that “makes me think and challenges things but is also entertaining, and strange.” (Strange is big with Stanfield.)

When we meet in early May, he’s fresh from filming the mega-budgeted The Girl in the Spider’s Web: “big and spectacular,” he says, and so, naturally, a little less “grounded” than some of his other projects. (Less diverse, too: A month later, he’d tweet the movie’s trailer, along with the aside “I’m the only black person in this film lmao.”) He was a few weeks into a relatively brief New York sojourn, having temporarily relocated here from California, where he grew up, to film Someone Great, a romantic comedy for Netflix in which he stars opposite Gina Rodriguez. “I needed to do this film, because relationships have been interesting for me,” Stanfield says. “So this is a way to explore some things I may not have mentioned and talked about in the flesh with the people that I have been in relationships with . . . an opportunity to sort of dive in in a sort of cathartic way.”

Really, he’d like to play the villain. “I mean, in my perfect world I would just be the Joker and that would be all I be,” or “maybe Edward Scissorhands. Some crazy, creepy character that gets to wear a mask, or paint, or something like that . . . Maybe if I could play, like, a Kanye West type of being, that just makes people feel things and think things and [makes them] mad and happy and sad. I feel like that’s truly in my spirit to be a character like that.” (It was early into West’s apparent embrace of the alt-right: a few days after the selfie in the Trump-signed MAGA hat, but some weeks before Desus and Mero told The New York Times that “[Kanye] doesn’t realize we just want music and sneakers from him. That’s it.” The day I meet Stanfield, West goes to TMZ’s offices and declares that “slavery . . . sounds like a choice.”)

It’s less the outbursts or the affection for demagogues than the idea of West that interests Stanfield the most when we talk. “I think he’s an artist. I like some of his stuff, and some of the stuff I don’t like, and it’s as simple as that. I don’t claim to know him personally, or even know anybody like him personally,” he says, though he still thinks he’d play him pretty well in a movie. (For the record, I would also like to see that.) “I think it’s an interesting time to be Kanye, or to be a person like Kanye, and to exist in a space like the Internet, which is a place of zero context, where it’s like, something can happen and automatically there’s an influx of ideas about it and perceptions that run like wildfire,” Stanfield says, picking up a kalimba from the coffee table in front of him and sounding a few notes. “It’s been interesting to me just watching people respond, because I don’t put very much in people and celebrities and things of that nature.”

For Stanfield, social media is “just yet another platform of expression. Artists use it the way they use it,” he says, “but I do think that there might be some value in people looking less to what is being fed to you on Instagram, Twitter, online, news, media . . . I think put the phone down for a second, and turn the TV off for a second, and just kind of feel what you feel.” His own social media presence is probably best described as arbitrary: He Tweets and Instagrams when he feels like it, sometimes, apparently, in character, and later, he deletes what he’s posted, also when he feels like it. “My online existence is but an extension of me—but in a sense, that’s not me,” he tells me. “I am as much my online presence as I am my characters that I play, which is to say, it’s a thing. It’s not really me. You can’t get a sense of the real me, ’cause I’ve been trying to catch him for years and I don’t—where’s he at?” He mimes looking around the room. “I’m still trying to figure it out.”

This came to the fore in late June, when Stanfield created a small uproar after uploading a pair of “freestyle rap” videos—one titled “offensive freestyle (not for the easily offended)”—in which he issued denigrating epithets about women and gay people, one of which bore the caption: “I’m not always in line with the beliefs of my characters. But sometimes I am :).” (Sample reactions on Twitter ran from cries for his “cancellation” to “Lakeith Stanfield really uploaded a video of himself reciting a prewritten homophobic rap two weeks before his feature film drops, unbelievable.”)

Stanfield subsequently posted a video on Twitter apologizing. “I make videos all the time, which I usually end up deleting as soon as I make them, and I assume characters that have different viewpoints and different views on life . . . Some things my views are in line with, and some things my views aren’t in line with, and this character that you’ve seen is a character I’m definitely not in line with, and I definitely don’t believe those things,” he says in the video. “I’ve never been homophobic. I’ve never agreed with homophobic thought or hatred toward anyone . . . I’m a person who moves in love. Love for all people and all different types of love and every form it takes. I just want people to have a clear understanding because sometimes I make these things that could be very offensive and I don’t always have the luxury of context.” He goes on, “I apologize if it hurt anyone, sincerely. That wasn’t my intention to just be somebody that was out here just slinging arrows and hurting people.”

Back in May, he tells me that “I think some people aren’t ready for the Internet. I don’t know, it’s kind of weird to say, but the technology has sort of surpassed the consciousness, so people aren’t ready to deal with that level of intersection, that level of communication. It’s strange, because we should be, but I think we’ve been so long dormant not only in our self-image but in our communication skills that we’re not ready to interact in that way, and that’s why what you’re starting to see is that it’s creating this sort of, you know . . . ” Troll-rich hellscape? Addiction-encouraging feel-bad-about-yourself-and-the-world machine? “Hell yes, yeah. So this is why I think it’s important for kids—it’s kind of weird to say, kinda old school to say, but I think maybe wait to get on the Internet until you’ve had some life experience. Wait until you have some foundation by which to stand on, before you indulge.”

And then there’s the maintenance involved. “If people are like, ‘Oh, why are you always deleting all your stuff?’ Well, if you think about permanence on the Internet, that’s a strange thing.” What other situation exists where a passing thought you have hangs out in a searchable database for consumption and analysis and hot takes by strangers? “I don’t think that life actually works in that way. It doesn’t. So it’s weird for me to exist in a space where anything is permanent.”

Pop culture, with its zigs and zags and constant rebirth of and insistence on piping hot new talent, is hardly the place for permanence, anyway, though Stanfield has already demonstrated his own brand of staying power (even in a climate with very little patience for what can read, at times, like the machinations of a self-sabotaging provocateur). He confesses, when pushed, that he does, on occasion, tire of people quoting his zaniest lines from Atlanta (“Can I measure your tree?”) or bellowing “Get out!” at him on the street (they always yell it, he says, “actually, I’d appreciate it if someone whispered”), but he does not anticipate being inexorably tied to any one role, or being forever remembered as Darius, or Andre, or Cassius, rather than Lakeith. He has plans to do more behind the camera, for one thing: He’s been writing, a bit, and he shows me a Chaplinesque short film that he directed with some local kids in Atlanta as stars. “I don’t really exist in fear of being pinned down to one character. I don’t really think I’ve put a drop in the bucket to what I’m capable of . . . in the most humble way,” Stanfield says. “I think there’s a lot of extra ways I can stretch.”